In the words of Phil Haack, “I Love to code.”
I’m never happier than when crafting a new piece of functionality to delight the users of my software.
A few years ago I came to a truly horrible personal realisation: my code had too many defects. While I was still meeting deadlines and delivering working code, I was spending too much (way too much) of my time fixing things. Getting rid of defects that shouldn’t have been there in the first place is not a fun way to spend a day, a week or a month.
In this talk I pass on some of the things I’ve learnt about being a better developer - how I stay on top of what I’m doing, how I work to become a little bit better every day, and how I strive to write code that is simpler to write, easier to debug, and more resistant to defects in the first place.
Links to People
- Phil Haack
- Steve McConnell
- David Seah
- Scott Hanselman
- David Allen
- Tony Hoare
- Brian Kernighan
- Linus Torvalds
Other Links
- Github
- The Emergent Task Timer
- It’s not what you read, it’s what you ignore
- five.sentenc.es
- The Dash-Plus System
- Personal Kanban
- Code Analysis
Presentation
| Audience | Date | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Reserve Bank of New Zealand | August 2014 | |
| Wellington .NET User Group | September 2014 | |
| Auckland Code Camp 2014 | September 2014 | |
| Xero Developers | September 2014 | |
| Canterbury Software Cluster | May 2015 | Shorter 30m edition |
| Christchurch Code Camp 2015 | May 2015 | Revised 60m edition |
| COMPSOC, Canterbury University | September 2015 | |
| Wellington Code Camp 2016 | April 2016 | |
| Trade Me Dev Day 2016 | July 2016 | 45m edition |
| Microsoft Ignite 2016 | October 2016 | |
| Rust Meetup, Christchurch | June 2025 |
Twitter Reaction - Christchurch Code Camp 2015
